Chapter three returns us to Yuyu. It opens with this whole long fakeout where he’s desperately running from a terrifying pursuer and it turns out to be training by Dace.

This is one of the various D&Disms. The author honestly writes the training well – it’s full of details about how he’s getting torn up in the rush and finally scrapes his foot horribly. Those are absolutely considerations that should feature in the training of a newbie hero.

Unless he’s an exalt. They don’t take minor damage. Other things exacts can do include reflexively stopping a wound from bleeding. So naturally he’s getting his ass kicked by brambles and he’ll be chewed out specifically for the fact his bloody wounds leave a trail as a result. He’s also got lots of minor scars, which exalts also don’t get what with the perfect healing. If something tore you up badly enough to leave any evidence, it should be a story in itself.

Further showing his inferiority, when he thinks he’s managed to trick his pursuer, rather than continue on (because obviously the guy will realize he’s lost the trail soon and double back to try to find it) Yuyu decides to just hang out and soak his wounds. Even though a stream is the gold standard for hiding your trail.

The position of the moon through the trees told him he’d been running for over three hours, and he was bone-weary. He’d tried counting how many places he’d been cut during his flight, but they seemed countless, and he worried that infection and illness would catch him before anyone or anything else could.

If Ratcatcher’s a semibyssal, Yuyu isn’t even a semi-exalt. He’s barely a semi-heroic mortal at this rate. Three measly hours of running? Concern he’ll get infected from a few thorns? Conan spits in your face, pretender.

He’s annoyed by the fish in the river, so he finally pulls his feet out, and then the water spirit grabs him. Or possibly water elemental. Yuyu panics and flails helplessly for a bit, certain he will die. If an elemental can kill you, you deserve it. For inexplicable reasons, Dace intervenes and Yuyu then recounts the chapter in just as much detail, because filler is god.

I really thought I was going to die until you showed up.”
Dace shook his head. “So you were nearly drowned by something swimming around in the water of the very stream you’ve been standing in while you were telling me all about what you did in the woods tonight. Have you ever thought that it might still be there? Waiting? Ready to strike again?”
Yushuv spread his hands, his expression quizzical. “But you’re here now, aren’t you?” His voice was plaintive.

Yuyu is actually being totally reasonable here. Whatever was attacking him disappeared as soon as Dace said to stop. And he’s completely right – the thing that attacked him was actually Dace’s friend helping out with the lesson.

Of course, that’s the limits of his brainpower. When Dace tell the elemental or spirit to say hello, and then it says exactly that, he starts screaming as if he’s been attacked out of the blue.

he was chased here by some idiot priests from the Immaculate Order. Because we have known each other for so long, he and I occasionally do each other favors.

Dace, as a sig character, is not a super experienced solar. He’s a super experienced human mercenary who’s recently gotten an exalt boost. He doesn’t hang out in Immaculate-heavy areas to start with.

Also, the Immaculate Order doesn’t hate all gods. It hates gods that are acting against its rules. Acting against its rules usually involves making a mortal cult. Gods generally raise mortal cults either with direct threats or promises of prosperity that come at the cost of someone else (this region is allotted X units of water, this village gets all it wants while the rest suffer from drought).

Gods are pretty dangerous to tangle with, so people don’t attack them for no reason. The Immaculate Order can be trigger-happy, but the tension is among the mortals trading one rule for another who demands a different sort of tribute and may not help you as much, because almost all gods are huge dicks who deserved any and every punch to the face they got.

“Yushuv, Creation is filled with a host of absolute marvels. It’s also bursting at the seams with a thousand different beasts, spirits, monsters and servants of various dark powers who have one thing on their mind: showing you what the insides of their guts look like. And to aid in this, most of them work very hard to make themselves look like all sorts of innocuous things. I’ve seen serpents that look like flowers, armed with venom that would boil your blood in an instant. I’ve seen beasts that resemble nothing more than a blanket of dry leaves, but step on them and they’d flay the skin from your bones in seconds. And I’ve seen things lurking in the waters of the world that you wouldn’t even see coming before they tore you to bloody chunks. All you’d feel is a slight tickle, like a fish brushing up against you, as they made sure you were actually worth the effort it would take them to chew.” He grimaced. “Good thing we weren’t along the coastline, or you’d be feeding those fish by now.

This is all a D&D outlook. Creation is popping with cool things, but as exalts, half the monster manual exists as interesting flavor. If they’re concerned about things lurking in the waters of the world that you wouldn’t even see coming before they tore you to bloody chunks. then just learn the charm that lets you know when you’re about to be attacked and combo it with a perfect dodge. If you’re feeling cranky, add an attack charm in there and the moment you’re attacked, you backflip out of the way and skewer your attacker in the same move.

Okay, that’s just what it looks like OOCly, but ICly, exalts are supernaturally aware of hidden danger, in addition to the fact they’re durable enough they really aren’t going to get shredded by anything in a single move. He’s already way about human competency just by being an exalt. And if some random wyld-twisted snakes are invisible with venom that’s capable of instakilling an exalt with a bite, beat whoever’s running the game to death with the corebook as a warning to anyone else thinking of pulling that shit.

If you want the heroism of someone living on the knife’s edge of survival, you want heroic mortals. Exalts have a lot more slack.

Anyway, Dace finishes by saying that he’ll be cutting Yuyu loose soon, because why would a guy specializing in running a private army believe in working together, and before then he might just decide he doesn’t want to rescue Yuyu, because that’s sure how soldiers think. Also, he isn’t getting out until he formally introduces himself to the spirit.

“How do you introduce yourself to a large water spirit who has its hand on your head?”
Dace laughed. “Carefully,” he said, and walked off.

To give a quick idea of the power level, a sworn brotherhood of Dragonblooded + secret Sidereal is basically the top level of power in Creation, and more than capable of beating down any but the very strongest gods in a straight fight. They’re outmatched only by experienced Lunars, of which there are maybe a few dozen (depends on how powerful the secret Sidereal is). Yuyu singlehandedly killed a whole brotherhood of Dragonblooded and nearly their secret Sidereal, who incidentally was a Sid elder and one of the most powerful people alive.

And this isn’t even a moderately powerful spirit, because it got its ass so thoroughly kicked by Immaculate priests it’s cowering in the middle of nowhere. The odds of Yuyu killing it by accident in a panic are astronomical.

Chapter Four is Holok, the worst Sidereal.

“Disappointed.”

That’s how I feel too!

That had been the word Chejop Kejak had used to describe his opinion of Holok‘s performance on the mainland, and it stung.

Yes, for him to be merely disappointed Holok got his ass handed to him by a baby Solar while losing an entire brotherhood of Dragonblooded is a pretty big insult. It’s basically saying he expects about as much from a millennia old Celestial exalt secretly ruling the world as he does a Dragonblood, and not one of the better ones like Mnemon.

Holok, instead of marveling that Ketchup Carjack didn’t kill him because waiting twenty years for a new baby Sidereal that needed to be trained all over again seemed more appealing than trying to use his incompetent ass for anything, is now bitchy and spits in the Blessed Isle’s general direction.

He insists that his task was practically impossible and even running across Yuyu was a success. He counts the fact Yuyu slaughtered the Dragonblooded as proof, despite the fact they were slaughtered pointlessly because Holok gave them no support whatsoever.

The boy had had help. That much was clear. The questions that remained, however, were dangerously vague. Who had helped him? Why? And how much? How much power did the boy already possess on his own, and how much training had he received? All of these were vital questions, ones that demanded quick answers and relentless follow-up.

None and no one but author fiat. Also, the loom of fate could totally answer these questions.

Meanwhile, perhaps because he actually does read the damn loom rather unlike Lazybones here, Carjack told Holok he’d gotten some “new information” that supposedly made the situation “much more interesting.” Because of this, he was sent off to find the boy and Wren, which he bitches about as being mutually contradictory because obviously it’s impossible to just mean that both are missing so keep an eye out for either and his job isn’t done until he’s found the other one too.

it meant that he was on a bench in Port Calin with a fistful of jade and no clear direction. He had no horse, no weapon

Fistfuls of jade is a buy-a-stable-and-armory sort of money. Also, what sort of lameass sid are you to not even have your own weapon?

He then wails about On foot, with no idea where to start or what finding them might entail? Dumped in this city with no assistance, no subordinates and no direction? To entertain even the smallest hope of success was foolish.

If only he was the exalt type best able to gather information! If only he had access to a giant model of creation and could track basically everyone everywhere! If only one of his charms was magic google!

(Also, if only he had unparalleled traveling ability between charms, artifacts, sorcery and heavenly gates.)

He’d considered simply walking away. That, perhaps, had been what Kejak intended, for him to vanish into the Scavenger Lands, never to be seen again

I really do not believe that is what anyone intends when there’s only about 90 of you to handle all of Creation. Also, that’s functionally no different than my suggestion of murder and spending the next few decades training your replacement, with the only difference that at the end of it, he still has to deal with your heady mix of arrogance and incompetence.

He then says that he’s absolutely going to do the best job because he agrees that finding the kid at least is actually pretty damn important, so this entire section was just filler.

He hadn’t been officially barred from seeking help from the Immaculates, but the implication had been clear enough: do this yourself, or do it not at all.

This probably has more to do with getting a whole brotherhood of trained Dragonblood slaughtered and not even for fleeting tactical gain. I’d take away his underlying privileges as well.

He then slanders poor Ketchup with the claim the guy’s been doing fifteen centuries and more of intrigue for its own sake. This is a guy whose listed motivation is “Justify past sacrifices” while watching the glory of the world he lived in crumble into dust for those fifteen centuries. He doesn’t so much as breathe for its own sake these days.

Beggars took up stations, haughty in their pride of place on street comers they’d squatted on for decades.

This is something I see a lot in fantasy novels – begging as a borderline or outright inherited job, and always the pride thing. I don’t really like it – it feels like it’s there to say that begging is good, look at how happy these people are, it’s just their way of life. And I really can’t think of any culture that has this attitude about begging – usually there’s supposed to be a religious component. (Exalted does come with its own ridiculously overcomplicated caste society, which does verge on mandated beggars, but that’s getting into the religious aspect.) And this is Port Calin, which is tied to the Realm, which is a lot more practical about things.

There’s a great piece of fiction in one of the books about beggars where it’s a crippled soldier (because the Realm doesn’t give much of a pension) illustrating how the situation was already terrible and the war is putting even more pressure on everyone down to people who are just barely surviving. That’s the polar opposite of this – it’s showing begging really isn’t something most people are pleased with as a job, and it’s also showing a dynamic rather than static portrait of the world, where wars cripple soldiers, creating beggars since they can’t get any other employment, and further war will drain the resources used to support the beggars while creating even more who need charity, so maybe you should try to stop the Realm civil war before people like that starve to death.

Holok, instead, finds all this very life-affirming, and explains protecting this is why he hunts anathema.

Something in them changed when they were Exalted by the haughty sun; something human in them died. Sooner or later, the people around them ceased to be people and became objects, or worse, obstacles.

Bear in mind that for those 1500 years he’s been referencing, almost every anathema has been a lunar, who, as the name suggests, really have nothing whatsoever to do with the sun.

Also that is totally not why you guys boxed the solars. A baby sid might think this depending on who’s told them what, but objects/obstacles viewpoint was not only totally acceptable at the time, but it’s practically the motto of his exalt type. They have a charm that does nothing but destroy people’s love for you, because you messed up their plan by someone falling in love with you. They can rend open any acquaintance’s spirit to temporarily turn them into a dragon express flight for the exalt’s convenience at the low cost of leaving their target permanently insane. But luckily the rest of the charm tree to get there is full of charms to make acquaintances. You get a XP discount if you literally ride your new property.

So basically Holok’s complaint only makes sense if he’s bugged it takes the solars so long to realize all people are just objects or obstacles.

Anyway, he then stops a little pickpocket girl, who is frankly pretty stupid to mess with a monk what with all the kung-fu. She says there’s no point in turning her in because she’ll just get a beating. He says he has other ideas.

“Then what are you going to do with me?“ The question held no fear, only resignation.

I’m not sure if the author meant for this to stand in such stark contrast to Holok’s speal about this glorious bustling life. But anyway, he just offers to buy her a sticky bun…which actually seems even more pedo-y. Dammit, book. But given the setting, it’s probably more like gutloading crickets. It’s not healthy to feed your demons on starving urchins because they’re nutritionally deficient.